Carcinoma of the pancreas is the fifth leading cause of cancer death in the United States. Therefore, the development of model systems to study this disease is extremely important. We have developed a method to study both human and bovine pancreatic ducts in explant culture, as well as by biochemical and morphological means. The use of bovine tissues has enabled us to develop techniques that are directly applicable to human tissues. We have also developed techniques for the isolation, characterization and culture of bovine pancreatic ductal cells and for the culture of adult Syrian golden hamster pancreas as an explant. The Syrian golden hamster is an important in vivo model of pancreatic adenocarcinoma, and the addition of the hamster total pancreatic organ explant model to our studies should enable us to characterize the cell of origin of this cancer. The development of explant and cell culture systems provide a more rapid means of testing hypotheses relative to pancreatic cancer. We will study the explants and cells by morphological, biochemical and immunohistochemical techniques in order to extrapolate experimental animal data to man.